Quote

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

Thomas Carlyle

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Thomas Carlyle
Age: 85 †
Born: 1795
Born: December 4
Died: 1881
Died: February 5
Essayist
Historian
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Mathematician
Novelist
Philosopher
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Philosopher of Chelsea
Heart
Joy
Smiles
Love
Issues
Cute
Head
Contempt
Lying
Laughter
Happiness
Deeper
True
Essence
Stills
Spring
Transcendentalism
Still
Humor
Springs

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There can be no acting or doing of any kind till it be recognized that there is a thing to be done the thing once recognized, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.
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Thought will not work except in silence.
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Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.
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Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there.
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May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.
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A noble book! all men's book!
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A man must indeed be a hero to appear such in the eyes of his valet.
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The Christian must be consumed by the conviction of the infinite beauty of holiness and the infinite damnability of sin.
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Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life but only the house wherein our Life is led.
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Great is wisdom infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated it is the highest achievement of man.
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How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result.
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A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.
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He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.
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Variety is the condition of harmony.
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A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!
Thomas Carlyle
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The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal work it out therefrom, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself.
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There is precious instruction to be got by finding we were wrong.
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Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.
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What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity wherein dwelleth the Divine.
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What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!
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